The city’s water crisis has halted production of Triple Crossing Beer’s Falcon Smash IPA. (Courtesy Triple Crossing social media)
When water is the main ingredient of your business’s main product, a boil advisory is “pretty much a worst-case scenario.”
That’s how Triple Crossing Beer co-owner Adam Worcester described the city’s ongoing water crisis this week. The 11-year-old brewery’s production facility in Fulton has been shut down all week as the City of Richmond works to get potable water back through the city’s pipes.
Worcester on Thursday said Triple Crossing runs a tight brewing schedule, often brewing around 140 barrels of beer every week in Fulton, most of which gets packaged in cans and sent out for distribution. And even though the tanks can safely boil and pasteurize water, Worcester said the brewery can’t brew or package any beer without clean water coming out of the faucets.
Adam Worcester
“We use water to rinse cans, and after the can is packaged, we use water to rinse the outside of the can to get any beer off that’s on there. … We can’t make beer at all until we get water back,” Worcester said.
“January is traditionally the worst month of the year for us, just because everybody does ‘Dry January’ and things slow down significantly, so we rely on sending beer out to distribution to be able to make up for the lost revenue in the taproom. And now we can’t even do that,” he said.
The shutdown comes as Triple Crossing works on opening up its distribution network to Northern and Eastern Virginia, and recently added tanks to its Fulton facility to brew more of its popular flagship IPA, Falcon Smash. The brewery has a Midlothian taproom that’s been unaffected by the water crisis, but Worcester said its brewing capacity is about a tenth of the Fulton spot’s and can’t make up for the lost production.
Distribution is a tricky revenue stream for craft breweries to break into. With only so much space on grocery store shelves and only so many restaurant taps available, competition is stiff.
Worcester said that since Triple Crossing can’t send any beer to its distributor, it creates a perception among grocers that his brewery can’t keep up with demand.
“If you can’t keep a store’s shelves stocked, they’ll pull your item and put another one on there,” Worcester said. “I don’t think that’s gonna happen in this instance, but these are the kind of concerns that kind of go through my head.”
Tom Sullivan
Tom Sullivan, co-owner of Ardent Craft Ales in Scott’s Addition, said that since the pandemic, distribution has become a bigger and bigger part of his brewery’s business and holding onto shelf space is key.
Grocery stores “don’t really tolerate out-of-stocks with any sense of humor,” Sullivan said. “Like, Kroger is not happy if you can’t keep their shelves full.”
The boil advisory is also affecting liquor makers. Reservoir Distillery founder Dave Cuttino said it halted production at the bourbon-focused distillery, but since the company’s barrel aging production timeline is measured in years, not days as it is with breweries, Reservoir will have an easier time catching up.
“When it’s like this, you just don’t use (the water). You want to make sure you’re using the highest quality water, and in the past, City of Richmond’s water has been some of the highest quality water that you could get,” Cuttino said. “A situation like this stops production, but it’s not like it’s going to interrupt our bourbon supply in the next year. It’s really something that you look at four years from now.”
Dave Cuttino
The real impact is felt in Reservoir’s tasting room operations, which Cuttino said resumed Thursday for bottle sales. He said the distillery is planning to begin serving drinks on-site over the weekend, but since it doesn’t have water to make ice, patrons will have to enjoy their drinks neat, not on the rocks.
“We’ll still have Old Fashioned and Manhattans, but they’re just not going to have the big fancy rock of ice,” Cuttino said, laughing. “So you lose a little bit of it, but the flavor is still there.”
Both Ardent and Triple Crossing put reopening plans in motion Thursday that include serving beer brewed before the water crisis in single-use cups.
Sullivan said he and a group of about 30 other restaurant and brewery owners on Wednesday night had a call with newly installed Richmond Mayor Danny Avula and his staff to get clarity on reopening protocols.
“We were making sure we understand the rules and that we can do this without generating any unnecessary risks,” Sullivan said. “We were also making sure that the communication is getting out there so people understand that we’re operating under VDH-approved guidelines.”
Sullivan added that he and the other restaurant and brewery owners on the call also floated the idea of a meals tax holiday for January.
“That would give us a little breathing room to sort of offset our losses here,” Sullivan said. “So we’re waiting to hear back on that. Hopefully there will be some sort of assistance for our employees or to offset these losses.”
Cuttino at Reservoir said as frustrating as it is to lose money and have his business disrupted by the water crisis, he’s trying to keep things in perspective. He has family in Southern California who are preparing to evacuate because of raging wildfires sweeping through tens of thousands of acres.
“That makes our water thing seem like not so much of a hassle,” Cuttino said. “Is this a pain and is it hurting our business? Yes. But at least I didn’t lose my whole life in one fell swoop.”